According to Johan Saunders of Sara Lee (in 'Handboek Communities', 2009, p 32-34), companies can use an 'open innovation' strategy to interact with both customers and other relations (e.g. suppliers) in order to discover ideas or solutions for important problems they are facing.
Benefits of open innovation. By leveraging internet techology, open innovation can offer a number of benefits compared to traditional co-creation:
1. The participation is more active (questions can be more open and less predefined)
2. The participation is more interactive (facilitating other people to add builds to an initial idea)
3. Achieve an interesting mix of product development and commercializing (the participation involves a much larger number of participants and the idea is already shared, agreed and starts to 'live'). (...) Read more? Sign up for free

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